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Opal City residents talk about their home like it’s the best place in the world despite the weather and the villains. Personally, Ned’s seen better. Don’t get him wrong, he’s seen worse, too, but it’s just a city. Same as Philadelphia, only with more mimes.
It’s a pair of short train rides to get there, and he spends most of them reading and batting away a hazy, half-naked ghost he doesn’t really feel like talking to. He didn’t mention to Condor that he was planning on coming down during their weekly phone call, but if Ned knows him then he’ll probably feel him coming before he even steps out of the station.
Opal Station, despite Ned’s rather milquetoast reaction to the city as a whole, is almost breathtakingly stately, and when the retro-style train that only runs to and from Opal screeches to a halt he takes a minute to stare up at the elaborate mural on the ceiling of a whole host of celestial beings. Opal City really doesn’t do anything by half.
He spends a couple quarters to ring up Eileen just to let her know he arrived safely, then Bonnie for the same reason. People tend to worry about whether or not he’s going to get himself killed these days. Who would have thought that something about the whole “getting gutshot” thing really brings out some anxiety in your friends? Ned’s really over the fussing. The scar on his side barely twinges anymore. Sure, he’s not eager to repeat the experience, but Bonnie in particular would probably get him put on house arrest if she found out about the incident with that “Peregrine” demon. Like she wasn't the one who shot him in the first place!
The sun is so bright he has to shade his eyes when he leaves. He scans the sky automatically for winged shapes, but the only thing that crosses in front of him is a few pigeons.
Supposedly, Opal City’s got a whole lot of superheroes, even though their Starman has shipped out by now. Ned wonders if that’s part of why Condor likes it here. There’s less pressure on him, and he can just… be.
He sets off walking in a random direction. It doesn’t really matter where he goes. Black Condor will find him.
Times Past:
Ned wasn’t sure what to expect when he followed the trail of broken branches. It was hard to shake the worry that it would be a bear, even if he’s been doing this job for years and never seen one alive. Whatever it is, it’s big, and its trajectory was somewhat parallel to the ground—most of the brush was untouched until Ned moved through it, which means it was either clearing the bushes at a jump or somehow passing completely above them. The freckles of blood on the leaves were what worried him. A deer this severely injured probably wouldn’t be bothering to jump over bushes.
It wasn’t a deer or a bear at the other end. It was a young man.
“Oh, shit,” Ned breathed, scrambling forward. It was easy to see where all the blood was coming from. Half of the man’s mostly-naked body was covered in gouges, with one or two of them that looked like they might have been bullet grazes. The man glared at him as he got closer and lifted his hand in a clear “stay back” gesture. Ned promptly lifted his own hands, showing them to be empty. Hopefully the guy didn’t get too spooked by the gun at his waist. “I’m Ranger Ned Smith. What’s your name? What happened to you?”
“Don’t come any closer,” the man croaked, which wasn’t an answer to any of Ned’s questions but at least meant that he was lucid enough to form sentences. Ned hadn’t been too sure he would be, based on the blood that dripped down from his forehead.
“I’m not,” Ned promised as he sat down under a different pitch pine than the one the man was huddled against. “I’m not going to hurt you. What happened? Did someone bring you out here?”
“No,” the man said. Ned noticed that one of his shoulders was bulging unnaturally from its socket and his stomach turned. It must have been dislocated, either from the impact of hitting the tree or by the people who roughed this guy up. “I crashed.”
“I’m sorry,” Ned offered. “Look, I can call an ambulance or even a helivac if you need one. I’m not going to hurt you. But it’s going to be pretty damn cold once the sun goes down, and you’re not exactly dressed for it.”
“No!” The man repeated, eyes widening. Above Ned’s head, the branches of the pitch pine began to wildly thrash as though a windstorm was rolling through them. He tried crawling back, but there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. “I won’t let you take me. I won’t.”
“Okay,” Ned said hastily. “No ambulance, no helivac, no nothing. Just me and you. How about instead we go back to the ranger station and then figure out where we want to go from there? My truck is just down the road, I can help you get to it.”
The man looked at him, still clearly spooked. Ned did his best to look friendly. He’s been told he’s very good at that. And right then, this guy was definitely in need of a friend. Above his head, the branches stopped moving.
Finally, right when Ned was starting to give up hope that he would let Ned help him, the man spoke again. “...Fine.”
Ned takes a rambling route down a street called Pyle Avenue, passing by the courthouse and a library as he goes between them and the Rainbow Gardens. All the buildings in this part of town are massive, a few of them adorned with gargoyles that he can imagine Black Condor perching on or next to. But he’s not so busy imagining that he misses the blur plummeting from the sky toward him.
Even though he knows Black Condor has perfect control over his powers, it still makes Ned’s heart jump into his throat whenever he sees him hurtling toward the ground. It doesn’t matter that he (almost) always catches himself. He still thinks he’s about to see him splatter onto the pavement.
This time, Condor doesn’t land in front of him, he just scoops Ned up in his arms and pulls him into the sky with him.
“Ned!” Condor says, and he’s actually grinning. “You didn’t say you were coming.”
“You’re slacking,” Ned accuses, adjusting his grip so his arms are around Condor’s neck. Technically, Condor doesn’t need his arms to hold Ned up any more than he needs them to fly, but he seemingly eschews his preferred method of steering so he can cradle him. “I thought you’d know the second I got here.”
Condor does a barrel roll just to hear Ned yelp, the jerk. “It’s like Philadelphia. Too many people for me to feel everyone. But you were thinking about me loud enough that I heard you from the top of Sloane Tower.”
“Which one is that?” Ned asks, and Condor briefly lets go with one arm so he can point. His telekinetic hold remains, even though it looks like Ned’s about to drop right out of his arms. Ned’s life would be a whole lot different if he was scared of heights. The city does look more spectacular from the air than it does from the ground. Ned sees what all those Starmen like so much about it. They’re getting the same bird’s-eye view as Condor does.
For a moment they fly in silence with just the sound of wind whipping by in Ned’s ears. Then Condor slowly brings them to a stop, the tail of his costume snapping in the wind. It’s unlucky that it hasn’t needed any repairs lately, mostly because it would have given Ned an excuse to come up much sooner. “Ned?”
“Yeah, BC?” Ned stops watching the city pass below them and looks at him.
Condor avoids his gaze. “Did you miss me?”
Ned scoffs playfully. “What, me telling you every time you called wasn’t enough?” He kisses Condor on the cheek. PDA is probably fine, considering they look like a dot in the sky to everyone on the ground. Then again, that ship may have already sailed. Condor is flying them around in his arms, Ned pressed against his (very nice!) almost entirely bare chest. “Of course I missed you.”
Times Past:
“You’re sure you don’t have a name you want me to call you?” Ned pushed gently. The man from the woods has been living in his cabin for about thirty-two hours now. All of his injuries were miraculously closed by the time they got back to the ranger station, and he’d even relocated his shoulder with a quite frankly disgusting noise. He was still dressed only in tattered boxers, although by now Ned’s managed to get him some clothes that will actually keep him warm.
“I’m sure,” the man said firmly. Ned obviously got closer looks at him since he’s been at his cabin. He was younger than Ned by a few years, although not young enough to be a teenager, and his hair is patchy like someone held him down and shaved it. He told him he wasn’t from Lenapehoking when Ned asked—“My poor mother was Yurok and she and my poor father are dead,” he said, when Ned was trying to figure out if he had any family Ned could call for him—but didn’t tell him how he got over to the east coast or why.
“Okay,” Ned said, defeated. “You just… keep hanging out, then.”
The man hugged his knees to his chest. “Why didn’t you drag me to a hospital?”
“I figured it’d be a bad idea to ignore the main thing you asked me not to do,” Ned said truthfully. “Didn’t know it’d end up with you crashing here, but I figured you needed somewhere to go that was safe so whoever’s chasing you doesn’t find you.”
He didn’t ask how Ned knew someone was chasing him, so at least he knew he was being obvious about it. That was when he opened up a part of himself and let Ned in for the first time. “My name… I was named by my father. It’s my father’s last name. My grandfather’s last name. I can’t—I can’t—”
Across the room, the bulb on Ned’s nightlight exploded.
The man froze immediately, eyes—green eyes, electric green ones, even though Ned is positive they’d been brown before—darting first to Ned and then the door, as if he was gauging how fast he could run for it. Ned settled back from his crouch onto his heels and then fell onto his ass by mistake. He shook his head quickly, trying to dispel the idea that it was a reaction to that little revelation and not his own clumsiness.
“So,” Ned said. “I think on the news they call people who can do stuff like that ‘metahumans’ now.”
The man didn’t relax. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I won’t. Just don’t tell them I was here.”
“You’re not kicked out.” Ned stood up and brushed off the back of his pants. Keeping a clean floor as a park ranger who lived on-site wasn’t easy. Or possible. “Just try not to do that again. I’ve only got one box of spares.”
Black Condor smiles again. “Oh.”
“What’s your favorite place in Opal?” Ned asks. Condor’s told him about some of the sights, sure, but that’s different from actually taking them in from above. Or below. Condor does come down to earth sometimes.
Black Condor hovers for a moment. His hair whips around his face the way it does when he loses his concentration; most of the time, he uses his powers to push it back. “Here,” he decides, and curves the air around them as they bank right. “It’s this way.”
There’s a huge suspension bridge between the main body of Opal and what a sign tells Ned is called Olde Towne, and Condor swoops them toward the nearest of its towers. He lands them on the bar that spans the top of the two… tines? Ned’s not an engineer or whoever it is that’s in charge of building bridges, he doesn’t know what they’re called. They accidentally scare off a few gulls who had the same idea about perching up there.
“Really? Here?” Ned says. It’s not exactly quiet. The wind is loud, the cars rushing by on the bridge below them are louder, and everything is slick metal, a far cry from the sandy soil, pitch pines, and pepperbushes of the Pine Barrens. It’s not like Condor’s been a stranger to big cities in the time Ned has known him, but his favorite spots in Philly were quieter. A bit more peaceful than the top of a busy bridge.
“Here,” Black Condor agrees. “You can see practically the whole city from here, and no one else can get to it except for the Starmen.” He points out various buildings. “That’s the Beauveau, the art museum, the Opal City Opera House, and the main precinct for the police department.”
“The Beauveau, that’s where you live now, right?” Ned sits down on the bridge, steadfastly ignoring the swooping in his stomach when he does. Black Condor will catch him before he cracks like an egg on the concrete below.
“I’ll take you there later.” Condor doesn’t sit, just stands on his toes, arms extended so the wings of his costume catch the air, red and black “feathers” fanning. “Do you mind if I…”
“Go for it,” Ned says. “Enjoy.”
It’s really something, to watch Black Condor fly. The only other flying superhero Ned has really seen up close is the Ray, and while he was graceful (for the most part, anyway), there’s no one quite like Condor. The Ray had been a bouncing ball of light energy, ping-ponging back and forth like a comet trapped on earth. Condor is like an acrobat, tumbling and twisting and relying on his powers to catch him. Ned can even see the moments where he lets go and stoops into a freefall, something that does still make his stomach drop with the fear that this will be the time he doesn’t catch himself.
Ned had been there for his first few tentative flights after his crash. The progress he’s made is a sight to behold.
Times Past:
By then, the ghost of the first Black Condor had shown up, standing there with his ridiculous collar and sash. He gave Ned his name—two names, actually, Richard Grey Jr. and Tom Wright, although he seemed like he liked the second one more—and attempted to give him the man’s, which Ned had firmly ignored.
(“His name is Ryan Kendall—” The ghost said.
“No, it’s not,” Ned said firmly as he grabbed his nearly-empty carton of orange juice out of the fridge. The man was outside talking to Eileen. She was pretty much the only person who knew that Ned had someone staying with him on an air mattress crammed on his cabin floor. It’s not that he was trying to hide it from his boss, it just hadn’t quite come up yet.
“Yes, it is,” the ghost insisted. “You don’t even really know him, Ned Smith.”
“It sounds like I know him better than you do,” Ned shot back as he turned to glare at the hazy shape. “He told me he doesn’t have a name. That means he doesn’t have one. It doesn’t matter what you read on his birth certificate or heard someone call him or whatever his name was when he was born. Who says he has to have the same name all his life? That’s not how we do things.”)
Ned sat down on the steps leading up to his porch and watched the man catch thermals with the vultures. They had been learning about the extent of his powers together. It was nearly all based in telekinesis, according to the man, but that telekinesis allowed him to do some pretty incredible things, particularly flying. There was always a risk someone would see him, but who could turn down the opportunity to take flight? Ned certainly wouldn’t have been able to.
The only things that weren’t telekinetic were his healing abilities. That was the only thing he didn’t want to talk to Ned about. Understandable. They didn’t talk about what drove the guy to crash into the Pine Barrens and hide out with Ned, but Ned felt like he could safely assume it involved people hurting him for his powers, whether because of them or to give them to him. It wouldn’t be right to try to make him talk about that before he was ready.
The ghost of the original Black Condor is right about one thing, though. The man will make a pretty good hero one day.
Ned didn’t flinch as the guy came in for a landing beside him, even if it was only because he had been practicing keeping his startled response on the inside. “Enjoying yourself?”
The man nodded. These were the times Ned saw him smile the most. “There aren’t black vultures where I’m from,” he said. Ned sat up a little straighter. “Only turkey vultures.”
“They’re not very common over here, either,” Ned said. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up at the kettling figures. He can just barely see the light shining through the silver primary feathers from here. “I’ve only seen them a few times. Whenever they show up we get a lot of people asking if they’re condors, even though they’re only a little bigger than the turkey vultures.”
The man made a soft noise at the back of his throat. Ned looked away from the birds and back at him. For a moment he thought maybe the guy was going to say something about that damn “Black Condor” ghost, but instead he said, “They’re called prey-go-neesh.”
“Prey-go-neesh,” Ned echoed.
The man nodded. “He gave us the condor song to show us how to take care of the world.” He avoided Ned’s gaze, although Ned got the sense that it wasn’t out of embarrassment. “He carries prayers for balance to the sky."
Ned nodded thoughtfully. “What about the other vultures?” He pointed to the one turkey vulture he could pick out from the ground. Ned wasn’t exactly an ornithologist (although half the ornithologists he’d met surveying the Barrens didn’t want to listen to a park ranger anyway) but hey, he had to know his stuff. The name suddenly popped into his head, and he remembered sitting on someone’s lap and asking for the names of the birds again. “Mòchipwis flies pretty high.”
“Not as high as a condor,” the man said firmly.
"What about a golden eagle?" Ned asked. He knew this was beginning to tread on risky territory. The man had mentioned after jolting awake from the throes of a nightmare that someone had wanted him to be his "golden eagle," whatever the hell that meant. Ned hadn't pushed the subject then, too busy trying to calm him down, and he wasn't technically pushing it in this moment, either. If the guy didn't want to talk about it, he didn't have to.
The man didn't flinch. He just raised his eyes to the clouds. "Condors can go higher."
Ned looked at him a little longer and wondered just how high he could fly.
“Hey,” Ned says softly, watching Black Condor play with the gulls on the wind. It’s too quiet for anyone ordinary to be able to hear him, but that’s nothing for a minor telepath. Condor hovers, just far enough away that he has to push his presence against Ned’s mind to listen to him properly. Ned gestures for him to come over and he obeys without a second thought.
“What is it?” Condor asks. “Altitude sickness?”
“Nah,” Ned says. He smiles. “I’m used to that by now. I just wanted to see you better.”
Condor’s face visibly heats, and he ducks his head shyly. “I missed you,” he says. “If I didn’t say that already.”
“No, I don’t think you mentioned it,” Ned says lightly. He catches the trailing end of one of its wings and gives it a tug, making Black Condor bob closer obligingly. “I thought maybe the big time Opal superhero forgot all about his old park ranger buddy.” At the stricken expression on Condor’s face, he adds, “Joking.”
“...You always wanted me to be one,” Black Condor says. “A hero, I mean. Even when I doubted myself, you didn’t.”
“Only because I knew you could be,” Ned says. “There’s a reason I never pressured you into becoming a Sunday school teacher. And now look at you, BC. A stint on the JLA, that Leymen team you ran off to join for a while… Next thing I know you’re going to be leading the new JSA. In fact”—he pitches his voice slightly louder, eyes shifting to the ghost behind Condor—“I don’t think anyone could ask for anything more.”
The ghost visibly sighs. But he also tips a nonexistent hat in Ned’s direction, and this time when he dissipates, Ned doesn’t think he’s going to come back.
He’s already laughing when Condor pounces on him, cradling his head so he doesn’t hit it on the bridge and keeping a firm telekinetic grasp on him so he doesn’t slide right off. He kisses Ned like he always does, like he’s scared he’s going to vanish from his arms and needs to make every last second count. Ned knows the feeling.
Slowly, Black Condor draws back. “We might cause a traffic accident.”
“See, you even think like a hero,” Ned says, lacing his fingers at the back of Condor’s neck. “But if you insist, I think I’d like to see your apartment, too.”
On the shore, at the Opal City Police Department precinct that Black Condor pointed out earlier during their flight, Commissioner Clarence O’Dare lowers his binoculars. His wife Faith suggested that he take up bird-watching to de-stress, but he hasn’t had the chance to use his new optics much. “Huh.”
“What is it?” His sister Hope asks, stopping on her way out of the office.
“Black Condor’s up on the top of the Rougeableu Bridge with someone,” he says. “And he’s smiling.”
As he watches, the small figure that is Black Condor picks up Ned and takes him home.